Hawaii - Sydney

I just got back from the American Astronomical Society's High-Energy Astrophysics Division meeting, which was held in the beautiful Hilton Waikoloa Village resort on the Big Island. On the work side it was very productive; I kicked off the conference on Monday morning with an invited talk on bursts, and also presented a poster on our recent EXO 0748-676 result. Jake Hartman also presented some excellent work on the 2008 outburst of IGR J00291+5934 (poster 42.15). Of course, there was also the chance to catch up with all our old friends and collaborators; this was the best attended HEAD meeting ever! But in a place this beautiful you can't spend your whole time working, so we also took some time to play in the lagoon, and with the dolphins, etc.
On the way back Jasmina & I visited some more friends and colleagues at University of Sydney, and gave some more talks, as well as visiting the amazing Powerhouse Museum, from which it was quite a challenge to extract Aleks...

Thermonuclear bursts and the neutron star equation of state (invited talk 01.01l)
A 552Hz burst oscillation in EXO 0748-676 (poster 42.23)

US/Netherlands tour

I just got back from a very busy trip around the US, with a stop in Amsterdam on the way home. I presented a couple of posters at the AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division Meeting in Los Angeles, and went on to visit Ed Brown at JINA, where I gave a lunch talk on the following Monday.

Then it was on to Boston for a brief visit to MIT to catch up with collaborators and friends, as well as a pilgrimage to Toscaninis (sadly the Harvard Square location has closed). After that I had a couple of nights in St. Louis for the APS meeting, and gave an invited talk on burst observations in a special session on the physics of X-ray bursts (L3).

Finally I headed home via Amsterdam for another invited talk at the Decade of Accreting Millisecond X-ray Pulsars workshop at UvA.

HEAD posters 1 2 (0.24/1.22 MB PDF)
APS talk (10.2 MB PPT)
AMSPs workshop talk (1.5 MB PPT) and the proceedings paper

Netherlands visit

I just got back from a month-long visit to Europe, spending most of my time working at the Space Research Organisation of the Netherlands (SRON) in Utrecht on some thermonuclear burst work. The goal was to combine the RXTE burst catalog with the much larger sample accumulated by the Wide-Field Camera onboard the Italian-Dutch BeppoSAX mission during it's 7-year (1996-2002) mission. We now have a preliminary combined catalog, which we call MINBAR (Multi-INstrument Burst ARchive), and we are working on improving the data products from the BeppoSAX bursts. I also visited the JEM-X instrument team at the Danish National Space Center in order to investigate adding bursts detected by INTEGRAL to the archive.
But it wasn't all work — of course, we also had a nice time sightseeing and catching up with friends and family.